writing tips

Towards the end of any month-long writing challenge, the average writer finds herself grabbing at straws for inspiration to keep writing. All the great ideas that had been incubating up until the beginning of the journey are exhausted and she’s left with either a lengthy, cumbersome tome or yet another blank page of reticence representing the next poem or short story. All of the conventional approaches to consistent writing adamantly advocated by leading writer’s magazines, websites, and blogs are likewise worn thin and their effectiveness called into question under the scrutinizing gaze of the inner wild-child — who simply wishes to create with abandon.

If your wild child has grown bored with the carefully arranged, safety-approved environment of adequately structured playground equipment designed to stimulate just the right amount of brain activity and instead is testing the parameters of the playground itself, here are a few ideas to consider:

Honor the Block: Like all other demons of the psyche, writers and artists fear the dreaded Block; but fear only gives it more power. If you feel a block on your path, acknowledge it and invite it to your table. You may discover that it has something of crucial importance to impart, and it is your job to make way for its message. What questions would you like answered? Entertain a discussion and welcome the inevitable discovery of self that opens access into the deepest reservoir of your creativity. There are answers there. Some grave, some simple. Your Block’s presence may indicate major changes are in order, or it may simply mean that it is time to rest, or time to move.

Clean Something: Ever notice how cleaning off the kitchen table somehow leads to doing your taxes, a chore you’d been putting off for months? Just as our intentions are triggered and honed by unrelated activities, so can writing arise from non-writerly pursuits. And just as intent to write brings household chores to mind, so do household chores bring writing projects to mind. And obviously, writing, for most of us, is much more appealing.

Work Backwards: In a culture that advocates putting difficult chores first, days and weeks can fly past before we get around to doing what we really want. In writing, the difficult parts include, well, writing. Take time today to imagine the day you read from your published and wildly popular work. Imagine what you are wearing, where you are reading, and even the occupied seats of the venue. Design the cover of your book or get an author photo taken. Practice your signature and what you will write when fans ask you to sign their copy of your book.

Catalog Your Work: On days when I feel overwhelmed with things to do, I make a list of things I have accomplished. It immediately puts things in perspective and takes the pressure off. Instead of worrying about all the work that stands before the present moment and the moment when you can say you’re finished with your project, take a look through the work you’ve accomplished so far. I don’t just mean in the month of March, either, but through all the days of your writing life. This includes the comic strip you wrote in Jr. High, the love letters you penned in college, and the Journals you wrote as an undergrad. It should be obvious that everything you wrote for your college classes belongs in this survey as well. Impressed? You should be. Now to really bring to light just how much you’ve written over the years, index your journals, create a spread sheet of your papers, or stack everything you have in hard copy smack dab the middle of the floor and walk around it for a week. As a penultimate exercise in self-appreciation, check your Submittable account and wallow in the success of having actually sent your work out into the world. Some people never make it that far!

Go Where You’re Unknown: At the extreme end of this spectrum is moving to a different state or leaving the country. Culture shock will send you running to your Journal, your only true friend in the world, to normalize your experience, as a plethora of raw material pours forth. But even if you are a lifelong member of your community with no plans for ever uprooting, just going to an unfamiliar coffee shop or opting for a different branch of the library — ones your friends do not frequent, whose “regulars” are new to you, and whose location is in an outlying area — can trigger the kind compulsory focus needed for productive writing.

Remember, challenges like the Writers’ March are meant to work for you, not the other way around. If you find that any approach leads you down an ill-fitting path, simply turn around. You can always return to your comfort zone any time you like.

“I like guys’ butts. I look at a lot of the other stuff first, but there’s just nothing like a good butt.”

I composed those sentences as a college sophomore. My plan all along had been to study writing, but despite professors’ noblest efforts during my first four quarters, I wasn’t writing well. By “well” I mean authentically, with a voice that wasn’t pompous and stiff. I could put together grammatically correct sentences, but they didn’t pop with verve and personality. They resembled a perfectly coiffed hairdo set with ten too-many puffs of hairspray. They lacked movement. They hadn’t been lived in.

Then in winter quarter of my second year, I took a contemporary literature course. One of our assigned texts was Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, and our prof told us to pick any five of the book’s vignettes and write imitations of them. Unpracticed at true imitation, I retyped the first sentences from five different vignettes and used them as springboards into imagination. One such sentence, from a chapter called “Born Bad,” was “Most likely I will go to hell and most likely I deserve to be there.” In my “Born Bad” edition, I made a salacious confession: I had a thing for the male butt. For the first time ever, I wrote with glee. I had fun. I found freedom in writing about something that felt improper. Suddenly, I was voicing what I meant and sounding like I meant it. After reading my “imitations,” my prof said, “Whatever happened, keep it up.”

Now I’ve got a graduate degree in creative writing. I teach college composition to new faces every quarter, and several times during each course I tell my students, “If you accomplish anything in this class, I want it to be a paper with authenticity. Be yourself. Sound like yourself. Try to shake off that formal, five-paragraph-essay writer that high school made you become. Relax your verbal muscles. Speak onto the page.” Of course I want to be that inspirational coach or army general who in movies always says the right thing at precisely the right time, eliciting fist pumps and “Hell yeahs.” I want my students to magically write their own versions of “Born Bad.” Usually it doesn’t happen. Occasionally it does.

And while I’ve learned a lot about how to write since my own “Born Bad,” I still see that early vignette as a kind of holy grail, a standard that even now I try, and often fail, to reach. My current writing projects include essays about reverence and womanhood, and they’re worthy topics to explore, but as I revise drafts about such serious stuff, I can feel my writerly muscles tense, the old, formal, impersonal voice seep in. I don’t mean to say that somber topics can’t be written about with comedy or ease, but by nature of being weighty, they’re the most susceptible to that high-school writer who resides in most of us with annoying longevity. So during this Writer’s March, I’m trying to maintain momentum but also stay in hot pursuit of what keeps my words mine.

I’ve seen better.

Very soon, I plan to revisit “Born Bad.” That’s right: I’m a grown, lettered woman who teaches college students and folds clothes, and I plan to write a full-out essay about my love for the male butt. The life and playfulness should stay the same, but I’ll develop it, include some whimsical research, update it, mention how I’m lucky enough to have married the guy with the nicest ass I’ve ever had the pleasure of ogling. Maybe someday you’ll read the finished draft in the magazine that’s crazy enough to publish it, and maybe you’ll blush. I hope so.

But writing about lascivious topics, or anything else that loosens your writing voice, isn’t just about making your audience blush or about penning an extended “dear diary” entry. It’s not just a confession that wallows in self-indulgence. If it’s to become art, it will have to do more. Through revision, it must come to mean something to someone other than yourself. The bothersome quandary is, the craftier a writer gets about infusing her work with meaning, the more contrived–and therefore less meaningful–it becomes. Put authenticity first, and once you’ve written a draft about which you can honestly say, “This sounds like me,” you’ll have a potent clump of clay to form into what you and your readers need.

In the meantime, though, try writing about something naughty, something that you haven’t dared put to paper. Start with the same sentence I started with years ago, “Most likely I will go to hell and most likely I deserve to be there,” and write what comes next. Or in prose or verse, write about what body part you find sexiest. Write about what turns you on. Write about the weirdest, sincerest crush you ever had. But whatever your topic, enjoy the slightly wicked feeling it brings and write your way toward a natural, real voice. And once you’ve found it, hold onto it as firmly as I would to a damn fine ass.

When I was thirteen, I spent Christmas with my aunt and uncle in SoCal. My uncle had devoted a large hall closet exclusively to movies–the kind that consisted of black plastic and tape (after all, we’re talking the nineties). I’d never seen so many movies anywhere but the video rental store. The closet was filled with hundreds, many of them with their Costco stickers still attached, ranging from Disney classics to suspense. Because my parents didn’t let me have many movies, all I wanted to do during my visit was work through those VHS stacks. I shared a guest room with Rebekah, the twelve-year-old daughter of my aunt and uncle’s friends, also there for the holiday, and since our room had a TV and VCR, we watched multiple movies every day. She liked horror, so one night she picked Scream 2. We watched it well past dark, and, since this was my first slasher flick, I was terrified well past those two hours. Although fifteen years have elapsed, I remember the character Phil getting stabbed in the face through the bathroom stall’s wall and later his wife Maureen crawling in front of a projector screen, a knife protruding from her back. A complete slasher film lightweight, I’ve never watched another. And Rebekah didn’t have much of a chance to suggest any more because the next day her dad walked in on us cuing I Know What You Did Last Summer, which was rated R, and he said she couldn’t watch movies for the rest of their visit.

Despite my dislike for slasher flicks, I recently took to slashing my drafts. A few weeks ago I was revising an unwieldy, twenty-something-page essay (I’ve written about it before here and here); its many sections hadn’t found the right order yet, and after scrolling through them over and over on my computer, I couldn’t see them clearly–they’d blurred together into a confusing, unattractive lump. So I decided to make “cut and paste” literal. I took scissors, tape, clean paper, and a printed copy of my draft to a local coffee shop. With a cup of hot spiced chai as fuel, I sliced my essay into pieces and started moving them around as if solving a puzzle, which in reality I was. Once a sequence was right, I taped its parts together. On the plain paper, I handwrote new material–transition sentences, paragraphs that suddenly felt necessary. Mostly, though, I just worked with what I had. For more than two hours, I unscrambled my puzzle, and by the time I called it quits, the draft, while still imperfect, sang with fresh clarity. Other coffee shop patrons probably wondered why a grown woman was happily waving scissors about and stirring scraps of paper on a table. And if they had asked, I’d have replied, “Re-imagining.”

That’s really what I was doing: Most of the blocks were in front of me, and all I had to do was assemble them into a structure that held strong and pleased the senses. I had to re-envision what I had, like a dream that features real-life characters and locales but an element of the fantastic so that when you wake up, you see these people and places a little differently than you did before.

Usually I write fifteen-to-thirty page essays and stories. Somewhere between drafts three and seven, my subject and most of its development have been found, but they haven’t evolved into the right form yet. Until my “cut and paste” fest at the coffee shop, I’d muddled through that stage on my computer, but even my decent-sized monitor couldn’t truly show the scope of a draft; the most I could see at once was two pixelated pages. As a self-righteous proponent of printed, three-dimensional books over Kindles and their ilk, I hadn’t even bothered to consider that I could re-form my prose with the weight of actual paper and toner in my hands. But now that I’ve tried it, I’ll keep at it. Sometimes seeing your words isn’t enough to believe in them–you have to feel them too.

SLASHING AS REVISION

Whether you’re working with stubborn poetry or prose, print out your draft and cut it into sensible units. Then play with them. Start with a different line or paragraph. Swap a couple images or sections around. Let the old stuff surprise you. A hot beverage doesn’t hurt either. But a slasher film might.

Often on Mondays I ask my writing students to name the highlight of their weekend. I receive a variety of replies, from the sarcastic “revising my essay” to the provocatively nebulous “doing stuff with friends.” Every now and then a student proclaims “Napping!”, to which I respond “Awesome!” Although many students might think my rejoinder sardonic (and this is usually a safe assumption), in the case of napping it’s always sincere.

I love napping. Long ones, short ones, deep ones, dozy ones, naps are–as much as this admission may not commend me–one of my favorite pastimes. I close the blinds, set my alarm, pull up a fleecy blanket, and slide into sleep. And when I wake up, the tasks that seemed hopeless before suddenly stir with possibility.

On Wednesday of last week, I reached a stage of drafting that felt endless. While I was close to finishing my essay, which I’d started in 2011, I’d read its sentences so many times I didn’t really see them, let alone hear them, anymore. Some words didn’t sound right, but I wasn’t sure why. The structure had kinks, but I wasn’t sure how. My Writer’s March hours passed with minimal progress. Finally, I decided to nap, and by “nap,” I mean “take a break” from my project: I wrote poetry. I drafted one poem during my last hour of writing on Wednesday, another during my writing time on Thursday. On Friday I returned to my stubborn essay, my vision clear, ears alert. The draft improved at a rate I hadn’t seen in a long time. I sent the draft to a writing buddy that afternoon, and yesterday she proclaimed it, aside from a few line edits, “done.” By the end of this Writer’s March, I’ll have sent it out to be read, ridiculed, rejected, and–perhaps–picked up by a magazine editor.

I believe in writerly catnaps. Not multi-week comas, not evasions, but brief respites–a half hour, hour, couple of days, taken only when needed–during which the writer whimsically concocts something new. This other creative project is key. A writerly catnap isn’t a complete vacation; it’s a succinct foray into some other imaginative articulation that keeps one’s voice alive, just channeled in a fresh way. The benefits are (at least) two-fold: First, the writer will regain stamina for her main project. Second, she’ll have started something she might not have otherwise written. One of my new poems was a satire on bad romance novels, the other an acknowledgment of someone I’m worried about. Maybe I’d have gotten around to them at some point, but I’ll never know because I don’t need to find out–now they’ve been formed into existence and when I flesh them out someday they’ll have a chance at becoming resonant.

But whether a writer “naps” by crafting a poem instead of revising her novel, or flash fiction instead of memoir, she must do it with a time limit, then stretch her artistic muscles and return to the original piece in progress–that cantankerous, obstinate, inimitable first love.

Yesterday I went on the longest run I’ve gone on for a while. (Using patchy to describe my exercise record for this past winter is optimistic at best.) It hurt. For the last two miles, I was out of energy and out of breath. I had to pause four times to rally my muscular and respiratory systems, each time imagining that my body was a story’s punk villain staring insolently at me as she raised her middle digits. When I got home, I sank down onto the carpeted stairs, chugged water, and felt pathetic. But also accomplished.

This is not me.

After enjoying a snack–which I’d like to say consisted of exquisitely balanced portions of carbs and protein, but was really a Trader Joe’s cinnamon roll slathered with cream cheese frosting–I embarked on the next item on my agenda: three hours of writing.

I love what my friend Sam wrote about seeing writing as play, as enchantment. But for whatever reason, yesterday’s writing session was for my attention span what the run was for my body–hard work. I’ve been revising a personal essay that’s almost finished, but it’s not there yet. Sentences need to become cleaner and sharper. Sections need to be swapped around for maximum potency. I thought this final drafting process would be easy, but it’s not. And yesterday I had to summon all remaining willpower to keep at it for those three hours. As the minutes ticked by, distractions continued to appear: The couch wasn’t comfortable. The air felt too cold, then too warm. I was thirsty. I satisfied each need as it arose, determined not to let it eclipse my productivity. Although the going was slow, I got through the three hours, at the end feeling mentally hyperventilated. But, again, accomplished.

My point here is not that I’m awesome (though my back is always available for patting–that is, unless you’re creepy). My point is that on the days when writing feels like work, that’s okay. Adjust the thermostat. Kick your roommate/partner/spouse/cat out of the comfiest chair and claim it. Just keep writing.

Recently I read Stephen Koch’s fantastic book The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction, and there’s no other book about writing that I’d recommend more. The chapters travel through the writing process, from inception to the final draft. Chapter two, “The Writing Life,” is about becoming a writer by living as a writer. Koch says that any talent a writer has “will go to waste unless it is sustained and strengthened by the nagging, jagged, elusive thing called obsession, that stone in the shoe of your being known as a . . . vocation. Call it dumb persistence. Call it passion. Call it a fire in the belly or the madness of art. It is less the ability to write than the insistence upon writing.” I freely admit that I’m not obsessed with writing. I’m not the crazy wordaholic who sees scribbling in a notebook as her bread and water. At least not now. For me, writing is a choice–in the case of this Writer’s March, a daily choice. And today, day five, I can’t say that my writing is that much more brilliant, but I do feel like more of a writer. After all, as Koch points out, “Productivity is the only path to confidence. . . . Since writing is what generates inspiration–and not the reverse–abundant writing produces abundant inspiration.” So when you don’t feel the enchantment, write your way toward confidence. If you produce writing, you’re a writer.

Or, to speak for myself, the more I write, the more I know I’m a writer.

This is not me either.

Exercises (No Actual Running Required)

In the spirit of generating writerly confidence, feel welcome to try one (or more) of the following:

Pick a phase of your life (high school, for example) and write about how your spent the bulk of your free time. What did you love to do? What images and moments can you recall involving this activity?

Write about something that you’ve produced (infuse that last word with whatever meaning you wish).

Write a scene that shows you practicing something (an instrument, a sport, a concept like compassion).

6 Writing Tips from John Steinbeck (with Sliding Commentary)

1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

Maybe next year, I should make a Writer's March "suggested goals" page and use the wisdom of Steinbeck to start the thing off.

2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.

An alternative to this advice might be this: ditch the computer for a day and put the pen to the paper. I've been an advocate of writing by hand for years. Every first draft I've ever written has been scribbled in a notebook first. Feels nice to be confirmed by Steinbeck...

3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.

Just for fun, I want to know: Who is your reader? Mine's Randi, which is perhaps very very obvious. Although, I have to say the "Randi" reader in my head is Randi if I never met her, if that makes sense. (She also never reads this blog so how is that for irony?)

4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.

In other news, the thing I loved most about Jenn's post "Retyping Your Revision" advice was it helped me with these sticky, trickyscenes. I found that through retyping I instinctually knew what to move and what to cut.

5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.

And here it is again: Kill your darlings. Or perhaps save them for another story, but mostly, send them to the next life. Lately, I've been cutting these scenes into the "Comments" field in track changes because I become attached. You know, it's like having your cake and eating it too. And then later, when I get tired of the little boxes at the edges of my pages, its much easier to click the "x" and delete them.

6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

Good advice, but is it just me or is it a strange one to end with? (And yet much less strange than these side-slinging comments...Okay, folks, go and write!)